Performance Assessment of the Fixed Node Assisted Collection Tree Protocol (FNA-CTP) in a Mobile Environment

The Fixed Node Assisted Collection Tree Protocol (FNA-CTP) is a Collection Tree Protocol (CTP) for sensor network that has been augmented with special fixed nodes in order to support mobility. The algorithm functions like the conventional CTP algorithm taking advantage of the fixed nodes only when it loses a parent. Prior simulation analysis of CTP in mobile environments demonstrated that conventional CTP has significant overhead when the sensor nodes are mobile even if some nodes are fixed. On the other hand, FNA-CTP reduces the overhead due to fixed nodes and alterations to the trickle algorithm. This chapter presents experimental analysis of the FNA-CTP algorithm implemented on a set of sensor nodes that support tinyOS in an indoor sports field. Unlike the simulation results, the experimental results show that CTP outperforms the FNA-CTP algorithm though this primarily because it was not possible to recreate an experiment where the sink node was out of range of the mobile nodes resulting in less parent changes in CTP than FNA-CTP. In this chapter we present details and challenges of these experiments such as capturing and pre-processing of the packets captured by a sniffer in the field as well as at the sink.